Category Archives: Lebanon

Hezbollah, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia

Hariri’s Future Feels the Pinch: the Saudi Patrons Getting Stingy? What about Hezbollah?…………

   Rattlesnake Ridge   Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter   

 
      BFF   

“The long anticipated cutbacks in the Future Movement and its institutions have reportedly begun with a third of the party’s employees in the process of being laid off. Next in line are the movement’s media outlets. This current round of layoffs, which includes allegedly high severance pay, is believed to have affected 35 percent of Future Movement office employees, most of whom earned low salaries, such as service workers, janitors, mail carriers, and drivers. While a good portion of office employees were being let go, the big earners remained behind their desks and TV screens without paying much attention to what was happening near them. As a matter of fact, one of those big earners views these layoffs in a positive light, saying, “Most of those people have no place in the Future Movement. They were hired to end their complaints and that of their families who happen to support the Future Movement.” In the corridors of the Future building on Spears Street in Beirut, a number of employees say that media coordinator Ayman Jezzini took it upon himself to inform tens of employees of the decision to let them go…………”

The Hariri right-wing political bloc, also called the Mach 14, depends not only on the Hariri family fortune. It has also has depended on very generous funds from the Saudi ruling clan. Lebanese analysts have noted that in 2009 the Saudis went all out to defeat the opposition to March 14 in the elections. They managed to buy enough votes to get them a majority of parliamentary seats even though the opposition Hezbollah block got a majority (54%) of the popular vote. Thomas Friedman almost called it a “divine victory” although I wrote here at the time the equivalent of “not so fast, look at the popular vote, stupid”.
By the same measure, Hezbollah’s financial fortunes also depend on Iranian aid. Hezbollah does have a huge source of Lebanese emigrants who also send money to their villages and families and possibly to Hezbollah ‘charities’ (the U.S. government and the United Arab Emirates have been tightening the screws on many of these). There have been reports over the past few months of the Saudis putting the squeeze on Hariri, even as regards his personal fortune a lot of which is tied in Saudi Arabia (Mr. Hariri is a Saudi citizen). There have also been Saudi media reports that the Iranians are also cutting back their aid to their Lebanese friends.
It is hard times for everyone, even in Middle East oil producers, even with crude prices so high.
Cheers
mhg


[email protected]

Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, GCC, Iran, Lebanon, NATO, Persian-American Gulf, Syria, US Foreign Policy

Turkey and Iran and the West: Containment from the Gulf to the Mediterranean…………..

   Rattlesnake Ridge   Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter   

 
      BFF   

“Iran and Turkey said Thursday they planned to double their trade volume despite having political differences on Syria and a NATO radar shield on Turkish soil. “Our annual trade volume currently stands at 15 billion dollars but we hope to double it in the near future,” Iranian Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi said in a joint press conference with his Turkish counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu in Tehran. Despite the plan to increase trade, the two sides did not seem to have settled political differences, especially on the situation in Syria. ……….”
 
“Middle East powerhouse Turkey on Wednesday warned against a sectarian cold war in the region and said rising Sunni-Shiite tensions would be “suicide” for the whole region. “Let me openly say that there are some willing to start a regional Cold War,” Foreign Minster Ahmet Davutoglu told state-run Anatolian news agency before heading to Shiite Iran. “We are determined to prevent a regional Cold War. Sectarian regional tensions would be suicide for the whole region,” Davutoglu said, adding such effects would last for decades. “Turkey is against all polarisations, in the political sense of Iran-Arab tension or in the sense of forming an apparent axis. This will be one of the crucial messages that I will take to Tehran.”…….. Davutoglu is expected to hold talks in Tehran later on Wednesday on Iran’s nuclear programme and developments in neighbouring Iraq and Syria………..”

Davutoglu, with the talk of “Sunni-Shiite tensions”, seems to be jabbing the Saudis and their allies who have been stoking sectarian hatred for a few years now, especially along the Gulf. For a while there was talk, mostly in some Arab oligarchy media, of an Iranian-Turkish-Qatari-Syrian alliance. The Turkish role was exaggerated: after all Turkey is an old NATO member and a longtime friend of Israel. The Qatari role was also exaggerated: Qatar shares a huge offshore gas field with Iran and is also wary of Saudi attempts at hegemony over the GCC states. A Saudi-sponsored coup attempt against the Emir was thwarted in the late 1990s, with several high Saudi security officials arrested and jailed in Doha (they were released last year). Saudi media and the Wahhabi faux-liberal media on the Gulf were full of condemnation of a mythical Qatari-Iranian-Syrian-Iraqi-Hezbollah axis. It was supposed to be an “axis of evil” as opposed to the “axis of goodness and democracy” of Saudi Arabia-Bahrain-UAE-Taliban-Mubarak-Wahhabi shaikhs.
Now the Turks and Iranians are on opposite sides in Syria. Now the Saudis and the Turks and the Qataris are on the same side in Syria (almost on the same side: the Salafis and Wahhabiized Muslim Brothers of Syria are not exactly what the Turks like). The Turks are now seen by some Arabs as a counterweight to Iran, a NATO and a Muslim counterweight in Syria. There may be some complications: the Syrians and the Arabs have always claimed that the Turkish region of Iskandaruna (Alexandretta) is part of Syria and that it is occupied territory, just like the West Bank. That is another issue to ponder as the Turks and some Arabs get close enough to each other to start disliking each other again (all that stuff about familiarity breeding contempt). The West probably sees a two–pronged approach to contain Iran:

(1) The Persian-American Gulf to be “defended” by the Western forces, mainly the US Navy, that are clogging it now. Of course Iran has not attacked anyone in the Gulf yet, nor does it have any intention of attacking anyone “first”, Saudi and Salafi propaganda and fear-mongering by the Bahrain satraps notwithstanding.
(2) The Eastern Mediterranean to be “defended” by NATO, with the Turks as the main player. Lebanon is probably considered, wisely, very iffy: a majority of the people want no Western military forces, certainly no Israeli forces or outside Arab forces either. Lebanon was tackled with Western “intelligence” operations and Saudi money (a lot of Saudi money for such a small country). So far it has failed: Saudi princes are not exactly lovable, charismatic, or principled creatures. They can never buy love with money (not that kind of love), nobody can. This is not to say that the Iranian mullahs, or other Arab leaders, are very lovable either. Many are barely more lovable than Netanyahu or Lieberman (Avigdor not Joe).
 
Breaking Syria away from its Iranian alliance is the main prerequisite for success in the Eastern Mediterranean now. The pro-Saudi Syrian opposition (the Salafis, Muslim Brothers, some former military officers, even others, now seem to want Western (NATO) intervention against the regime. They want to be liberated by the West just as Iraq was liberated in 2003 and Libya was liberated in 2011.
After that, the Saudi camp hopes their Israeli allies will be able to soften Hezbollah and Lebanon.
More on this later……
Cheers
mhg


[email protected]

Al-Qaeda, Arab Counterrevoltion, Hezbollah, Lebanon, Salafi, Saudi Arabia, Syria

A People’s Democratic Salafi Kingdom in Northern Lebanon?…………..

   Rattlesnake Ridge   Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter   

 
      BFF   

“BEIRUT: Army commander Gen. Jean Kahwagi raised concerns at a recent security meeting that some refugees fleeing into the country in Arsal may actually be Al-Qaeda members, sources close to Prime Minister Najib Mikati told The Daily Star. The sources said Kahwagi’s comments at the Mikati-chaired Grand Serail meeting mimicked Defense Minister Fayez Ghosn’s recent comments to the media about “operations carried out at some illegal border crossings, especially in Arsal.” “Weapons are being smuggled [there] and members of terrorist groups are entering to establish a base [in Lebanon] under the cover that they belong to the Syrian opposition,” Ghosn said………… At the meeting, the sources said that Kahwagi confirmed that according to army information, some people who claim be members of the Syrian opposition and are smuggling weapons are in fact from Al-Qaeda. Kahwagi also said that when the army attempts to confront these people, groups in Lebanon object in defense of freedom………..”

Al-Qaeda types are nothing new in northern Lebanon, around Tripoli. The terrorist Salafi group is certainly itching to take on Hezbollah, not directly, but at least to weaken it. There have been past reports that the March 14 (Hariri-Saudi bloc) had in the past encouraged and financed Salafi groups in northern Lebanon (around Tripoli). Presumably the idea is to nurture a fundamentalist group that probably hates Hezbollah more than it hates Israel or the West. That would be the Salafis.
Then there is the Saudi angle: the March 14 bloc is largely financed by the Saudis. That is why Western media call March 14 “pro-democracy” and pro-Western, because they are financed by the People’s Democratic Kingdom of (Saudi) Arabia. The Salafis usually are the Saudi surrogates wherever they happen to be, and Mr. Hariri being a Saudi citizen……….
Cheers
mhg


[email protected]

Arab Revolutions, Lebanon, Libya, NATO

Lebanon and Iraq in Libya: NATO and the Warlords……….

   Rattlesnake Ridge   Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter   

 
      BFF   

“The unfreezing of £100bn in Libyan assets by the UN this weekend has fired the starting gun for a fierce battle for influence being waged by the country’s militias, in which the frontline is set to be Tripoli’s international airport. The glittering prize immediately in prospect is a consignment of several billion dinars, printed in Germany, which is due to be flown into Libya on board five cargo planes. Whoever controls the airport when the cash arrives will be able to levy a hefty security fee for delivering it to the country’s central bank. But the fight to control the airport is part of a far wider battle for political and economic dominance in the new Libya; one that pits the various factions who united to overthrow the Gaddafi regime against each other, as well as remnants of the dictator’s defeated military………….”

Libyans have just been liberated by NATO warplanes and special forces: just as Iraqis were liberated by the West a few years ago, just as the Syrians might be soon. Instead of getting on with the job of rebuilding the country, the militias are fighting, essentially, over the carrion left by the dictator. There have been more of these violent rivalries in the past weeks, with casualties.
It is possible that soon every Libyan militia will be identified by the Arab regime that supports and finances and arms it. There will be a Saudi militia, a Qatari militia, a UAE militia, and possibly even an Iranian militia. An Egyptian as well. It will be like Lebanon in the old days, like Lebanon these days. Except that the Lebanese militias kept within certain bounds and followed certain rules, especially when they were not massacring helpless Palestinian refugees (Sabra & Shatila) and other Lebanese.
The Libyans have their own money, but some will have much more of it than others, hence the foreign financing. But then, the Libyan may surprise me and put their house in order.
Cheers
mhg


[email protected]

Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, Arab Counterrevoltion, Espionage, Finance, Hezbollah, Iraq, Latin America, Lebanon, nuclear Iran, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism, U.S. Politics, US Foreign Policy, WTF

Mel Brooks and Oliver Stone of Persia: a Taliban-Hezbollah-Colombian-Iranian-alQaeda-Mexican-Texan-African Network………

   Rattlesnake Ridge   Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter   

 
      BFF   

“The court action, filed in Manhattan federal court, seeks nearly half a billion dollars in penalties from three Lebanese financial organizations — the now-defunct Lebanese Canadian Bank and two Beirut-based money exchange houses — and 30 auto dealers in the United States. The $480 million in penalties is the sum of the drug proceeds that are alleged to have been laundered; the government is also seeking to freeze and seize assets traceable to those companies………… Thursday’s complaint offers fresh details about the workings of what it says was a scheme to launder South American cocaine cash and Hezbollah’s own money, naming the American-based auto dealers and people it says were Hezbollah operatives. For example, the action charges that Oussama Salhab was a Hezbollah operative in Togo who ran a network that transported cash from cars sold in Benin on flights to Beirut. Prosecutors say he worked with Maroun Saade — suspected of being a member of the Free Patriotic Movement, a Lebanese Christian political party allied with Hezbollah — who has been charged in a separate case with aiding the Taliban………”

I wonder what Mel Brooks is up to these days? Is he teaming up with Oliver Stone? Could those two be working on something like this, this topic of my piece here?
Is it just the holiday season or is the world going crazy around me? At least from my current perspective in the Pacific Northwest it seems like many heretofore otherwise sensible people are going mad. Look at all this:

  • Hezbollah alliance with the Taliban (across fourteen centuries of separation, across five nations of separation)?
  • Iranian alliance with al-Qaeda which is the mortal Wahhabi enemy of the Shi’as (including Iranians and Iraqis and Lebanese and Bahrainis and Pakistanis and all others)?
  • Iranian and al-Qaeda alliance allegedly but ridiculously improbably going way back to the 1990s, mostly via the good offices and miraculous guesswork of Judge John D. Bates of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia?
  • Iranian-Mexican Drug Cartel-Texan Nutcase alliance to blow up a restaurant in Georgetown and its famous clients just because it serves mediocre food to smug bureaucrats and charges too much? This last one allegedly courtesy of the DEA and the U.S. Department of Justice, and possibly Mujahideen-e-Khalq, among others.
  • Iraqi-Iranian-Syrian (wtf?)-Lebanese alliance to conquer Bahrain as a prelude to conquering the rest of the world and forcing Rick Santorum and Rick Perry to become Muslims and make the Hajj to Mecca?
  • Lebanese-Columbian-Taliban-Hezbollah-Maronite Christian plot to make money from a new triangular trade but without the rum and the African slaves.
  • Hezbollah-IRGC-Wehrmacht-Goldman Sachs…….. oh zut, sorry. Got carried away.


WTF is going on here? Is everyone going paranoid or are all of these plots real? Should we start looking under our beds each night for Iranian mullahs and Lebanese Shi’as? Are the Wahhabi princes now financing the hated Shi’a militants as well? Or is it just that the ‘plots’ are thickening?
Cheers
mhg


[email protected]

Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, U.S. Politics, US Foreign Policy

U.S. Campaign Hiking: Gingrich goes to CMU instead of Iraq-Iran Border, no Rice & Rice………….

   Rattlesnake Ridge   Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter   

 
      BFF

“Former House speaker and Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has picked a foreign policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to be his national security adviser. Kiron Skinner directs CMU’s International Relations and Politics department and also services on the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel and service on the Council of Foreign Relations. Skinner has previously served as an adviser on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a member of the Defense Policy Board of the U.S. Department of Defense from 2001 to 2007. Skinner will continue to teach full-time on social and decision sciences at CMU, but will be on call to advise Gingrich………”

Clearly Newt Gingrich doesn’t like to stray far from the ‘reservation, at least in matters of picking policy advisers, if not in ‘other’ matters. His choice is somewhat better than Romney, who picked a veteran of the right-wing and genocidal Lebanese Forces militia (apparently Romney feels that he needs to shore up his right-wing credentials). But, hey, the day is young, and I have not looked in Mr. Skinner’s closet yet. This almost certainly means that he, Newt, will decline my advise to take a hike on the Iraq-Iran border, preferably making a two-feet sortie across the border. Dommage.
Gingrich is also eschewing the Bush-Obama-Clinton trend of seeking high profile female foreign policy advisers (Albright, Rice &Rice). Maybe ‘somebody’ has learned something after all.
Cheers
mhg


[email protected]

Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Politics, Arab Revolutions, GCC, Human Right, Iran, Lebanon, NATO, Salafi, Saudi Arabia, US Foreign Policy

The West and the Syrian Taliban: Advise from a Saudi Prince of Thieves?…………

   Rattlesnake Ridge   Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter   

 
      BFF

“This summer a senior Saudi official told John Hannah, Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, that from the outset of the upheaval in Syria, the king has believed that regime change would be highly beneficial to Saudi interests: “The king knows that other than the collapse of the Islamic Republic itself, nothing would weaken Iran more than losing Syria.” This is today’s “great game” – losing Syria. And this is how it is played: set up a hurried transitional council as sole representative of the Syrian people, irrespective of whether it has any real legs inside Syria; feed in armed insurgents from neighbouring states; impose sanctions that will hurt the middle classes; mount a media campaign to denigrate any Syrian efforts at reform; try to instigate divisions within the army and the elite; and ultimately President Assad will fall – so its initiators insist……….. The radical armed elements being used in Syria as auxiliaries to depose Assad run counter to the prospect of any outcome emerging within the western paradigm. These groups may well have a bloody and very undemocratic agenda of their own………The origins of the “lose Assad” operation preceded the Arab awakening: they reach back to Israel’s failure in its 2006 war to seriously damage Hezbollah, and the post-conflict US assessment that it was Syria that represented Hezbollah’s achilles heel – as the vulnerable conduit linking Hezbollah to Iran. US officials speculated as to what might be done to block this vital corridor, but it was Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia………….”

Bandar Bin Sultan, Saudi Prince of thieves, is advising the West on how to topple the Ba’athist dictatorship in Damascus and almost certainly install a worse regime of Salafis and other fundamentalists. That may be fine with the al-Saud rulers in Riyadh: the Salafis are their fifth columnists, bought and paid for, from the Persian-American Gulf states to Egypt and North Africa. The West will almost certainly miss the Assad dictatorship, once the Islamists rule in Damascus. Imagine the Taliban wedged between Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel. It is especially the latter border that should give the West second thoughts.
(I trust there is no need for my regular readers to have me repeat the well-known story that BAE Systems had given bribes commissions of about GBP1 billion (US$ 2 billion) to Saudi Prince Bandar Bin Sultan for his role in a huge British-Saudi arms deal. Tony (Yo) Blair killed the British Serious Frauds Office (SFO) investigation of it because it threatened a new British deal to sell weapons systems and pay the princes yet more bribes commissions. That came to be known as the al-Yamama scandal, and it set Tony Blair on his path to multimillion contracts with Arab and other oil potentates after he left office).

Cheers
mhg


[email protected]

Lebanon, Saudi Arabia

Lebanon’s Hariri Tweeting the Arab Potentates…………..

   Rattlesnake Ridge   Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter   

 
      BFF

I discovered that Sa’ad Hariri, of Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, tweets. It said that he follows seven others, but five of them he owns and one is a relative. That leaves one other and it is Fouad Saniora (which some might say that he also owns, or shares with his Saudi masters), one of the guys who were praying ten times a day in July 2006 for an Israeli victory.
When I first saw that he follows seven others I thought he meant the surviving sons of Saudi King Abdulaziz al-Saud (Ibn Saud), not just the Sudairi Seven. It turns out he is not following any of the usual potentates. I suspect he doesn’t realize they are tweeting incognito, that they tweet furiously, arthritis be damned. Most likely they have hired ‘fingers’ doing the walking and the talking for them.
Oh, it says Hariri also follows Twitter! Now why didn’t I think of that?
Cheers
mhg


[email protected]

Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Middle East

Condi Rice: a Shower for a Lebanese President, Raunchy Photos with Qaddafi………

   Rattlesnake Ridge   Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter   

 
      BFF

“The book recounts her signature diplomatic ventures, including a landmark nuclear accord with India salvaged in a last-minute negotiation and a Middle East peace initiative that came achingly close to bringing Israelis and Palestinians together. She also bluntly assesses foreign leaders. Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, “looked as though he was on drugs.” After shaking hands with President Émile Lahoud of Lebanon, she writes, she felt as if she needed a shower. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt rejected reform, saying, “Egyptians need a strong hand, and they don’t like foreign interference.” As for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, who was killed Thursday after a revolution, Ms. Rice adds details about his well-known “eerie fascination with me.” She writes that he made a video showing pictures of her while a song called “Black Flower in the White House” played. “It was weird,” she writes, “but at least it wasn’t raunchy.”……….”

“Raunchy” is like beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder. Old Colonel Qaddafi was quite a raunchy old man. What innocent poor Condoleezza Rice
was not aware of is that what is not “raunchy” in America is most
likely very raunchy in Libya. It’ll get even raunchier when the Islamists dominate the new “free” Libya. Also, Condi shook hands with the Lebanese
president and apparently he gave her the creeps: she had to rake a
shower afterwards. Maybe he came across as some kind of sleaze bag. I wonder if she ever shook hands with the prime
minister of Bahrain or the President of Yemen or….. . She would need a cocktail of “Raid” and “Clorox”
afterwards.


Cheers
mhg


[email protected]

Hezbollah, Iran, Lebanon, Middle East Nuclear, nuclear Iran, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism

David Ignatius Joins Saudi Intelligence, or is it Bahrain News Agency…………

   Rattlesnake Ridge   Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter   

 
      BFF

“But a Saudi official said Thursday that his country and the United States agree that Iran’s Quds Force was involved in the Karachi killing. That allegation, if true, adds important new detail to the portrait of an Iranian covert-action service that has been escalating its attacks against Saudi targets. The Saudi official, reached by telephone, said that Pakistani intelligence had identified the killer as a member of a Shiite dissident group known as Sapih Mohammed, which has connections with the Quds Force. The Saudi official said this conclusion, that the group had links with Tehran, was based on messages between Iranian officials in Islamabad and members of the dissident group. The Saudi official noted additional examples of Iran’s campaign against Riyadh and its allies. He cited the 2005 killing of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Al-Hariri. A U.N. Special Tribunal charged this year that the murder was plotted by four officials of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite militia in Lebanon. …………. According to the Saudi official, Shakuri was among the Iranians who met Hasan Mushaima, a radical Bahraini Shiite cleric, during a stopover in Beirut last February, when Mushaima was on his way back home to lead protests in Bahrain. A cautionary note: These are all just allegations, and raw intelligence sometimes leads to hasty conclusions, but………..”

“But” indeed. “But a Saudi official said…… The Saudi official said……… The Saudi official noted……. According to the Saudi official……….” Has Ignatius joined Saudi intelligence? If he has, then maybe he can find out from their officials the fate of so many Saudis who have disappeared in their own country: no trials, to charges, no news, and from all over the country. At least CNN bought this tale, according to Wolf Blitzer. This writer is building an all powerful worldwide network around the allegations of a Saudi intelligence official. Apparently, according to Saudi intelligence (and no doubt their Bahrain sidekicks) the uprising in Bahrain was orchestrated by Iran through their Hezbollah proxies. According to the Saudi official the whole thing is tied to the assassination of Hariri. Maybe with some help from Oliver Stone. Now if the Egyptian uprising had gone in a different direction, it still may, the writer would have tied that to the omnipotent mullahs in Iran.
No doubt those Iranian scientists who get murdered by “terrorists” in the streets of Tehran and get kidnapped in Mecca and Istanbul and Europe are not targeted by a network similar to the Karachi network.

(About the Hariri assassination: no doubt Mr. Ignatius, as other Western media, was also convinced two or three years ago that the Syrians had killed Hariri, and most likely wrote something about it. But that was before Hezbollah replaced Syria as the ‘target’ du jour).
Cheers
mhg


[email protected]